How Portnoy's Complaint changed Australia forever

In 1970 Penguin Books Australia took a radical decision that upturned over 70 years’ worth of censorship legislation.

The publishing of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint shook the Australian censorship laws to their foundations and started a landslide of societal change.

The book sold 400,000 copies, but subsequent court battles with Penguin exposed the system's claim to protector of moral decency as absurd and repressive.

Australian award-winning author, Patrick Mullins, tells Kathryn Ryan the publication by Penguin was the nail in the coffin of the country's censorship system.

His new book The Trials of Portnoy is about the saga of the publishing of Philip Roth's novel, and the cast iron response of the government of the day.

“It was in many respects an Australian version of the Lady Chatterley's trials in the UK," he says. "It was a moment of quite seminal change, both in how literature is treated and understood, but also in the rights and freedoms we get from these kind of battles.”

Portnoy's Complaint tells the humorous monologue of a lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor who confesses to his psychoanalyst his most intimate, shameful secrets. It caused  a storm of controversy over its explicit and candid treatment of sexuality, including detailed depictions of masturbation using various props, including excrement.

“The language and the use of sex in the book were the features that the censors took most umbrage with. That was the basis for not bringing it into Australia and disallowing it,” Mullins says.

“But that really frank discussion of the taboo was something that was going to be quite a catalyst, because debates around sex and autonomy were rife in Australia at this time. So, it was in a way not just the sex alone, but also the issues it fed into. It was the door to bigger issues.”

The book’s treatment of the main character Alexander Portnoy’s deprived complexity as a human being triggered a frenzied reaction from some of Australia’s most reactionary elements.

The very idea of masturbation was itself taboo, with many religious and politically conservative figures viewing its depiction as presenting a corrupting influence on the reader. When the book’s publication led to court trials it was argued in prosecution cases that autonomy and auto-eroticism could lead to children disobeying parents and other disordered, rebellious minds causing wider harm to society.

“Lawyers said Portnoy was a deprived and corrupted figure who had the capacity to corrupt with his self-obsession. The defence agreed, but said he was also portrayed as a lonely and pathetic figure,” Mullins says.

“So, on the one hand you might say he’s a pervert, the defence would say he’s quite lonely and isolated and that the book is not to celebrate him and celebrate those acts, but actually to show that there’s a moral here that we need to explore and understand in order to rehabilitate this man.”

Mullins says Australian was on the brink of social change in the late 1960s. Vietnam War protests, as well as land rights and women’s rights campaigns, were raging. Censorship was bound up in that, a gateway in many respects to discussing these things, he says.

At the same time, domestic Australian publishing was growing, with publishers trying to influence the culture and the future political trajectory of the country.

Mullins says those resisting change, using old colonial laws to censor as a means of doing so, saw a need to keep Australia ‘pure’, protected from ideological or moral contaminants. Anything considered obscene, indecent or blasphemous had to be rooted out.

Minds that could be corrupted not only included children, but the uneducated lower classes, women, and people of colour.

The type of literature censored reflected the oppressive, racist values of Australia’s ruling classes at that time, often reflecting class antagonism too.

“The books that were caught up in that were ones that portrayed people of lower classes, which would appeal to people of the lower and working classes,” he says.

“Books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for example, where you have a groundskeeper who has an affair with a married woman of noble birth, that obviously contravenes that, and that’s partly the reason it was banned.

“Another book that was a problem for the censors was Another Country, by James Baldwin, which depicts homosexuality and inter-racial relationships, so that was a no-go. So that book too was banned.”

He says Australia had a reputation for being a stridently censoring nation, resulting in many modern classics being banned. Although Australia had adopted Britain’s censorship laws, the country even prided itself as being ‘purer’ than Britain regarding what was considered permissible.

“The censorship system… came at its most conspicuous and severe in the 1920s and ‘30s when works of modernity, particularly things like Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or James Joyce’s Ulysses.

“When those books were published they were banned because they advocated and portrayed ideas, people and characters that the censors would have no truck with. There was a resurgence of it in the 1950s, with books like Forever Amber and into the 1960s, with books like The Group, Lolita… so there was a lot of books that got banned.”

Resistance to censorship was sporadic, depending on what had been banned, and therefore ebbed and flowed. But during the 1960s, with decisions to ban books bringing more widespread ridicule and frustration, better organised, more sustained campaigns against censorship laws began, he says.

That campaign was influenced by successes abroad.

“When Lady Chatterley’s Lover was released in the UK, Australia said no, we’re still not going to have it. And then Penguin Books published a transcribe of the court trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to highlight and honour the role that was played there, Australia said, ‘we’re not going to have that book either, we’re going to ban a court transcript’ and Penguin then published in secret… this was one of the kind of models for what Penguin did with Portnoy’s Complaint…”

Wider battles were also being fought and the student movement jumped onboard.

“The censorship system was also coming under attack from the domestic system as well. The editors of the student magazine Oz, for example, were tried under obscenity laws on two occasions and on the second occasion [in 1964] they were actually sentenced to six months’ hard labour, a ridiculous decision that was overturned on appeal, but it drew a lot of attention to censorship again.”

He says another student action, led by Wendy Bacon, successfully clogged up the courts with prosecutions when she deliberately littered the student magazine she edited with expletives and obscenities.

By 1970 the system was under sustained attack, so that when Portnoy’s Complaint arrived, partly because it was a work of clear literary merit and acclaim and partly because it drew on these obscenities and pornographic tropes, it was able to strike at all the foundations of the system at the same time, Mullins says.

Although the ruling Liberal Party and all Australia’s federal states stood firm over Portnoy’s Complaint, the Labor Party eventually developed a policy of classification – that censorship would only apply to those under 18. It signalled the beginning of the end for the draconian censorship regime.  

When Portnoy’s Complaint was published in 1970 after the ban in 1969, it sold 75,000 in two weeks.

Penguin had published it in secret, which led police across the country scrambling into bookshops to remove the offending items. Court proceedings across states started immediately.

In each case experts were called into court to assess the literary worth of the book and, although court rulings were mixed, the censors were made to look increasingly foolish. Where courts found in the censors’ favour, fines were relatively insignificant.

In New South Wales two jury trials were unable to come to verdicts after deliberations.

“You had this situation where the book was available in some states but not in others, and in some places you just couldn’t get a conviction and it forced the government and state governments to backdown. They realised ‘we’re done’.”

Authorities realised that progressive forces for change weren’t going away and that conversations sparked by the book had created a momentum towards change. Exchanges in court designed by the prosecution to create moral outrage failed to hit the mark.

"One of the most memorable moments of these trials was when a prosecutor got up and read out this horribly scaly passage from Portnoy's Complaint where a woman takes a poop on a table beneath which a man is masturbating and the prosecutor says, 'Oh, this is horrible, it's disgusting don't you think Mr White?'. He's talking to Patrick White, who is about to win the Noble Prize for Literature in a few weeks' time and White shrugs his shoulders and says 'well, I've heard of worse things happening in Sydney in fact'. This kind of nonchalant response - the things that that jury are being invited to condemn, they already happen. It's just a daily part of life.

"Other times these things that that jury tries to drum up for condemnation and this kind of damnation, they're deflected. One of the witnesses, Professor Harry Hessletine, said on the stand when one of these passages was read to him, he quotes the Roman poet Terence 'nothing that is human is alien to me.'

"He was saying that literature allows you to have empathy and allows you to understand and allows you to make connections. And banning a book like this prevents those types of connections, empathy and understanding, prevents this autonomy that is sorely needed."

The trial, he says, helped the country discuss the concept of autonomy and its importance, particularly to young people, many of whom were being sent over to Vietnam to fight a war they didn't believe in, yet they were being denied the right to read a book.